Blog: Barcelona

Drupal About Halfway To Being Fully Multilingual

The Multilingual Drupal session was held yesterday afternoon at DrupalCon Barcelona. The big news of the session was that we officially changed the status of the mission to make Drupal fully multilingual from "making progress" to "about halfway there." And even more exciting is the hope that we'll reach our mission with the release of Drupal 7. 

Gábor  kicked off the session by explaining some of the key concepts surrounding multilingual Drupal. He also went into some detail on XLIFF computer aided translation tools and showed a pretty neat demo of how you can use XLIFF to translate content on your site. Depending on your desktop application, you can also tap into translation memories to help speed up repetitive phrases and words. After demoing these translation tools, Gábor highlighted the main multilingual features that are in Drupal 6 core and what's left for Drupal 7. 

Jose then took over to talk about the i18n (internationalization) module and described what it used to do and what it does now. His approach with i18n is to follow a pattern of decreasing contributed modules' responsibilities when they'd best exist in core. Once DrupalCon comes to a close this weekend, Jose will be sprinting to get the i18n module upgrade completed, and then will focus his efforts on jamming on the pieces left to get in Drupal 7 to make it fully multilingual. It was good and very motivating to hear Jose say that he's not interested in getting 90% of the way there - he's going for 100% or broke on this. 

We at Development Seed will continue to support this work by sponsoring Jose's time on internationalization and by giving status updates and reports via our blog. Stay tuned for modules to try, patches to test, and issue queues to discuss the latest efforts toward a fully multilingual Drupal 7.

My apologies to everyone hoping to watch the session via the recording we promised to post. Unfortunately we're having problems with our video camera and it looks like we won't be able to record any of the sessions ourselves. Drupal is streaming some of them here.

Best DrupalCon Ever?

Over 420 members of the Drupal community were at Citilab this morning to kick off DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. Among them were eight members of the Development Seed team. After a busy and exciting summer, it's great to have a group of us here for a week of pure Drupal.

Today's sessions include an introduction to Form API 3, an in-depth look at the state of internationalization, and the Google Summer of Code Showcase. We're lucky to have several SoC students attending and we'll get to share some of the great work that we did this summer. I'll talk briefly about the SMS Framework project, but I'll go into further detail on Thursday during the SMS and Drupal session. We'll also be recording that session and posting it here on the blog.

This is an exciting year for DrupalCon. The slogan for the show is "the best DrupalCon ever." With the large number of quality sessions, the ideal location, and the number of motivated attendees, I think this will be possible.

And Our Presentations on Multilingual Drupal, SMS, and Aggregation

Greetings from Barcelona. I'm sitting above Las Ramblas in Barcelona, five stories up in a loft with a cross breeze coming off the Mediterranean. It’s a pretty nice place to sit and work, fortunately. Truthfully, I know I'll have to return to Barcelona some day to actually explore it when there's not something so distractingly exciting as a Drupal Conference, which starts in just five days. 

At DrupalCon Barcelona, which runs through next Saturday, there will be more than 80 presentations across four days. So yeah, I’m excited : ) 

I'm looking forward to many of the presentations, particularly a couple on Drupal and Facebook, as well as some geekier ones about  a new database API based on PDO in PHP 5 and CCK in 6.x and beyond.

We're putting the finishing touches on the presentations we'll give at DrupalCon, which are part of the sessions Multilingual Drupal, Aggregation and Drupal, and SMS and Drupal. 

Jose Reyero and Gabor Hojtsy will be presenting on Multilingual Drupal. They’ll talk about the many advances that have been made for Drupal 6, what's left to nail on the road map, and the current status of multilingual websites on Drupal 5 in combination with contributed modules.

For Aggregation and Drupal Aron Novak, Ken Rickard, and Alex Barth will discuss past issues with aggregation in Drupal and recent advancements in contributed modules. Aron will also talk about the new feedAPI in depth and about the opportunity to join forces around the feedAPI and what this could mean for the future of aggregation in Drupal.

Will White, along with Chad Philips and Jeff Miccolis, will present on SMS and Drupal. This presentation will focus on the SMS Framework, how it is constructed, and the contributed modules that you can use with it. Will is going to discuss some of the lessons learned during the creation of the API, as well as a bigger picture of how SMS and Drupal work well together. Chad and Jeff will share additional use cases of SMS and Drupal.

We'll record our presentations and post them to the blog next week, so if you’re not headed to Barcelona you can check them out there. And if you are going, see you soon! I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone and meeting the first time attendees. We’ll have a table set up at the conference, so stop by and say hello!